I was Googling "Tempus Fugit" and was astonished to see that David Martin had actually contacted you almost exactly a year ago about the song by the Notorious Head of Smersh, and your blog entry on it.

My name is James, I am the drummer he speaks of in his message to you. I had simply done a Google search on the Smersh a while back and found your blog entry, told David on myspace, and I guess he emailed you. I thought you might be interested to know a couple of fun facts about the Smersh, since David has always been a man of few words, and you seem to have a slight interest in the band.

Yes, you are correct that the name is taken from James Bond.

Tempus Fugit was written around 1997 and recorded in David's living room on a 4-track. We recorded 9 tracks in total, and called our first CD "No Strings" because David was always breaking his.

Until I Googled the song title, I had no idea what Tempus Fugit actually meant. I was the drummer, I didn't need to know. :)

The singer (and bass player), David's brother Jonathan, hated singing, and we would have to leave the room when he recorded his vocals because he wouldn't sing if there was anyone else in the room.

We played two shows in our time together in the Smersh, both battle of the bands competitions. We didn't win either, although one of the times (I think the second one) we played our 8 minute opus Loud Bit, Quiet Bit, and most people left the room. Our third "show" no one attended.

I moved to the States from England in 2000 and that was the end of the Smersh. I haven't seen the rest of the band since then, although I have contacted David on myspace.

I'd also like to echo David's sentiments in saying that I'm quite honored that you put our song on your blog. The Smersh was a good time for me when I was a teenager, and holds some incredibly fond memories. The idea that our music is still, 10 years later, floating around the internet, and that people are enjoying it, is quite astonishing. David and I joked recently that we should do a reunion tour, or at least a greatest hits. I still have all the mp3s so it's possible. :)

You have made an old ex-drummer very happy. It all seemed worth while now :) Thanks again!

As you can see, 35 percent of me is infected with lame. Honestly, I would have estimated that I was slightly more than half lame — not less — but who am I to argue with Lamefactor?

In case online social networks weren't already a means of gauging someone's social acceptability, Lamefactor is a new Facebook side project that allows users to rank their friends, HotOrNot.com-style, in terms of lameness. In short, it marks the end of everything safe and hospitable that made Facebook a haven from the innate crappiness that is MySpace and Friendster.

Spencer turned me onto this little feature, which has you log in and then begin ranking associates on a scale ranging from one — "lame" — to ten — "savage/wicked/other regional slang." You can't skip a person, thus disabling the option of only giving out high marks and keeping your hatreds private. You also can't see who ranked you what, but only what your average score is and how many votes — that is, judgments — you have been dealt. Thus, it's a free license for everybody to take you down a notch. After all, the name of the game is Lamefactor and not Coolfactor or Acceptablefactor or Doesn'tHaveFoodOnFacefactor.

Being bored during a few brief minutes of inactivity this past long weekend, I started clicking through my Facebook friends, ranking them as accurately as I could. Shortly into this, however, I began to feel awful about the process and irritated at my compulsion to destroy profiles that still had perfect ten scores with a snarky five or even — on a few particularly vicious occasions — a one to the people who appear on my Facebook "friends" list only by virtue of my reluctance to endure the social awkwardness of not accepting their offers of friendship.

Then I stopped.

Most people I'm friends with hadn't received any votes yet and the notion of them logging in and seeing that their first and only vote has been a one did not sit well. ("Hey, let's have a look at this new thing on Facebook! … Oh, apparently someone I know actually thinks I suck and is too polite to tell me to my face but not polite enough to anonymously vote that I am virtually devoid of any good qualities. Nice!") In hopes for karmic retribution for my earlier judgments, I finished out my friends by giving everyone else tens, in hopes that someone bothering to check out Lamefactor would be momentarily brightened at the notion that someone, somewhere does indeed think they're special. Hokey, I know, though to contradict the altruism I must admit that it was a mental struggle to click the "ten" option for a few cant-standables who popped up.

Okay, I'll admit that my mad ten-givings were even less selfless in nature. First, I wondered if the good people at Facebook actually may have designed the system to assign rankings based on how politely or meanly someone votes, rather than on how other people vote on them. Second, I honest-to-God feared that trashing my secret enemies would end up subjecting me to a scam in which the dumped-upon can pay to find out who gave them low scores à la the "purity test" episode of Veronica Mars and Tina Majorino would expose me for the callous would-be-anonymous that I am.

Thus, if you're my Facebook friend and you log in to Lamefactor and find that you have one and only one vote and it's a ten, know it's me. Conversely, if you log in to Lamefactor and fine that your have one and only one vote and it's not a ten, then feel free to load hatred upon me.

What's especially interesting "tibcat" is that by virtue of the feminine version vanishing from English, the generic "cat" could arguably become associated with female cats. Most people are familiar with the expression "tomcat" — perhaps as the verb "to tomcat," meaning to roam around looking for sexual gratification — but if the term is associated with male cats without an understood complement for females, the construction could arguably become "tomcat and cat," as in "dog and bitch," "cock and hen," "lion and lioness." What, then, does that say about the culture that uses the feminine synonymously with the generic?

The two other animal words that jump to mind as examples of the feminine being used frequently to refer to the whole species are "cow" and "duck." Think about it: How often do you drive by a dairy and say "Look at all the cows and bulls"? You don't. Regardless of how many of the animals are male, the whole group gets takes the female term, possibly because the activity humans most associate with them — milking — is inherently feminine. Ducks do too, though what feminine association we have with ducks is beyond me. "Duck" can technically refer to the species as a whole or the just the lady-ducks, with "drake" referring to just the man-ducks. (I blame Ducktales for the confusion.)

What trips me up when speaking of these strange animal gender problems is that other familiar species avoid the problem altogether by having an understood name for the male, the female and the whole species in general. Take sheep, for example. Most people know that a boy sheep are rams and girl sheep are ewes, yet we can still refer to them by their species name and not identify gender one way or the other.

Strange, strange.

And on a final note, does this mean that Mindy and Sally Sue can go out on the town, tibcatting around?

A non-work-related workplace conversation with Hannah led us to look into what English words exist primarily in the feminine gender, with the masculine version being based off them. More often, it's the other way around, with "actor" being the default word and "actress" being the modified version that specifies the person described as female. A quick Google search revealed that most linguists pick out two words that are, by default, feminine but still have masculine versions: "widow" and "bride." The masculine versions — "widower" and "bridegroom" — are both longer and clearly use the original feminine as the root.

Telling, no? The only words to have this honor refer to a married woman and a woman whose marriage has been ended by her husband's death.

Upon further discussion, however, I vote that English has a third, equally sexist construction. While the dictionary definition of "prostitute" may or may not demand that the word refers only to women, I feel that if you stopped some stranger and asked him or her to picture a prostitute, the image in their head would probably be the stereotypical streetwalker: big hair, fur coat, high heels, dangly jewelry, sad look in eyes. (Said stranger might just as easily deck you or run away, of course.) When speaking of men in that profession, people often affix "male" to the term. As in, "You've got your prostitutes and then you've got your male prostitutes." The differentiation is further needed by the lack of a term in American English to explain male prostitution. In Britain, you can just say "rent boy" and get your point across, but I feel people in the states would not be familiar with the term. There's also "gigolo" and "hustler," which can debatably be used to identify certain kinds of male prostitutes, but both can also have less pejorative meanings of "guy with a sugar mama" and "guy who steals your money at a pool table." Thus, because the phrase "male prostitute" is the best way to express the notion and is longer than the default "prostitute," I feel it belongs in the same category as "widow" and "bride."

So do you hear that, ladies? You can know claim "prostitute" in addition to the two other jobs society allots you in life. Bonus points for the first one who can claim all three!

EDIT: Immediately after posting this, I remembered another odd male/female construction that merits a mention. Back when I was editing county news at the Nexus, a reporter wrote a story about a local ballet company in which she wanted to refer to ballerinas and their male counterparts. She asked me if male ballet dancers had a name, and I realize I didn't know. Copy didn't know either. I called my dance major friend, who'd been wearing tutus all her life, and she said she'd never heard of such a term either. (She suggested "ballerinos," but I declined to use it.) So we called the ballet company and asked them. To our surprise, they said the technical term for male ballet dancers was "cavalier," though the term can also mean anything from "a young man of fashion" to "horseman" to "mounted solider." I later used the discovery in an internship application cover letter as representing one of the reasons I liked being an editor: the various problems writers faces so often end up with an editor learning something obscure that they would never had bothered to look up had they not been set with the task editing the story to begin with.

Some Back of the Cereal Box regulars may remember my horrified fascination with the opening credits of the Adult Swim anime series Big O, which I refused to watch beyond the opening theme song. The clip below showcases the credits nicely, though I maintain that they don't give casual viewers the slightest idea what the show might be about.

Time hasn't changed my opinion. The music is still terrible and the special effects are still of such a quality that I could have made the sequence myself after half a quarter of Madeleine's Flash animation class. And what is "Big O"? Is it the robot? An extremely satisfying orgasm? Could "Big O" be a large vagina, as the phallic silhouette of the car would suggest?

Like I said the first post about Big O, a cast line-up consisting of negotiator-officer-android-butler could make for the perfect TV show, for all I know. However, a better foursome might be a trombonist-gourmand-toddler-crossing guard. There's a show I'd actually watch.

In any case, I've found a YouTube clip of Big O's second season credits, which I eagerly watched in order to see if they better explained this mysterious show. Do they?

Nope.

Better, I suppose, than season one's, though the music would seem to be ripping off the amazing credits of Cowboy Bebop. Apparently guns and explosions play centrally into the plot of Big O — as I could have predicted they would, being anime and all. As far as a more fleshed out cast, the second season seems determined in introducing the android from season one as "R. Dorothy." (I can only hope that is short for "Robo Dorothy.") And as if to defy my demand that some explanation of the interrelationships among the negotiator, the officer, the android and the butler, the series has added a fifth character, Angel, whose job is identified as "?" and nothing more.

Great, Big O, the addition of a question mark to the regular cast of characters really motivates me to catch up on this show. For what it's worth, the creators could have just replaces all the text in the sequence with question marks as a means of representing my total bafflement about the show.

For the record, here's the aforementioned opening credits from Cowboy Bebop, a better show that I actually watched and enjoyed. They may not be all that explanatory either, but oh how cool they make anime seem. Quite the task, indeed.

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Last night ended as many on State Street do: with the gorging upon of food at places that I wouldn't have had any inclination to visit had I not tossed down a few drinks beforehand. Mad Dogs — which occupies the spot where Hot Spots once lived, and where the Fish and Chippery had before that — was the only place willing to serve my party shortly before two in the morning. Thus, hot dogs and chili fries it was. Like I said, not what I would have done had I been sober, but that wonderful phrase "had I been sober" can be neatly tacked onto the end of so many sentences in order to make objectionable behavior seem acceptable, right?

So there we sat, the six of us — three boys, three girls, in the kind of gender balance that makes me happiest — scarfing down things that were either greasy or phallic or both, when the stereotypical drunk girl approached us and asked us to settle a stereotypically drunk argument. "Hey, how many oceans are there?" she demanded.

It's a good question. Upon first glance at the Mercator projection of the world that graces our hallway, I'd have to say that Earth has but one ocean, singular and whole as blue, dark blue and light blue flow from one corner the next. What I mean to say is this: One can pick out the Baltic Sea easily, as the land that borders it clearly makes it a self-contained body of water, but where do the molecules of the Pacific Ocean stop and become the ones that belong to those of the Atlantic or Arctic or Indian? This uneducated writer can't say.

Apparently the classification of an "ocean" results from an entirely technical process now, though I doubt this was the case back in the days of eye patches, cutlasses and scurvy. Factors like water temperature, particulate matter, inhabiting species and current direction all factor in, likely in ways that use a large calculator, I'd imagine. The big surprise that we found after our cab dropped us off at the house and near internet access is that modern science now regards the world to have a full five oceans, not four.

The Pacific.

The Atlantic.

The Indian.

The Arctic.

And the Southern.

I know, I know. "The Southern"? The name simply can't compare with the wonderfully peaceful-sounding name of the Pacific or the mythology-reminiscent name of the Atlantic. But more importantly, when, exactly, did a bunch of eggheads convene and decide to render years of elementary school geography invalid by creating a fifth ocean? And could the same group of know-it-alls have been the ones to discredit Pluto as a planet? According to the Wikipedia page for The Southern Ocean, the body of water was officially defined as such by the International Hydrographic Organization in 2000, the decision being mostly based on studies of currents.

Eggheads. I told you. And word of the change never got word to me. This, friends, is why we have TV shows like Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader Who Stuck a Q-Tip in Too Far? I suppose I'm okay with science's claim that the sea has five distinct regions and not the four I'm used to. After all, I never learned any cute mnemonic device for remembering the names of the oceans. The planets, however, will never be the same. "My very eccentric mother just sent us ninety pizzas" has tragically become "My very egocentric mother just sued Uncle Norman."

Drunk girl, if you're reading this now, know that I bothered to look it up.

In some places when an old cat becomes a bake-neko, its tail is said to split in two, then it is called a neko-mata or "forked cat". Like most bake-neko, neko-mata are unusually large cats, reportedly a meter and a half long minus the bifurcated tail, and often walk about comfortably on their hind feet. They are said to dance and manipulate the dead like puppets, and are associated with strange fires and other unexplainable occurances. Sometimes the tails of kittens were cut off as a precaution, as it was thought that if its tail couldn't fork, a cat could not become a bakemono.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Charlie Pace — never my favorite. Among the plentiful Losers, as I like to call the cast of Lost, Charlie was an “always the bridesmaid, never the bride” type who, following derring-do in the pilot, slunk into the background. Following the resolution of his heroin addiction plotline, Charlie seemed to just spin around Claire, forming the closest to a nuclear family that the show had to offer. Thus, his death didn’t come to a surprise, in my opinion, since anyone familiar to the show should know the writers so often depicted family interactions as being rather toxic and fragmented.

Following last night’s season finale of Lost, I have to say that I feel a sense of relief, rather than — ahem — loss. Charlie’s much-foreshadowed death struck me as tragic but fitting, even heroic in his last-minute scrawling of “NOT PENNY’S BOAT” on his hand in an effort to warn Desmond that Naomi — a.k.a. the girl who fell from the sky — may not be the savior the Losers had hoped for.

Furthermore, the show didn’t end this season on as much a jaw-dropping cliffhanger as the previous two seasons did. That’s a plus, in my book. Sure, the faithful must now agonize until February over the notion that the Losers do, in fact, escape Four Toe Island at some point. Based on Jack’s appearance in his “flash forward” — as opposed to the flashbacks that mark every single preceding episode — not everyone who escapes is better off for doing so. How can this be? I have no clue, nor do I expect to for the next year or so. But I can just happily ponder that. It won’t occupy the amount of mental energy the week-to-week chain of surprises and mysteries did.

I have to ask again, however, if the Lost writers had a grudge against certain groups: namely Mancunians and black people. In one episode, Lost dispatched its two characters who hail from Manchester — Naomi and Charlie — just one episode after the pair bonded over their shared hometown. Granted, Naomi isn’t necessarily dead one the ground, but a knife to the back doesn’t bode well. Even less so for the blood pouring from her mouth.

Naomi — who looks like she could be Hispanic or Indian or any number of races but whose last name “Dorrit” leads me to believe she’s black, much as Marsha Thomason, the actress who plays her is — marks the most recent in a long list of dearly departed black characters. First, Michael, shortly after he shot two characters to death, left the island with Walt, then Eko was smashed to death and Miss Klugh took a bullet in the chest. The sole black character with a speaking role is now Rose and God help the writers of Lost if they knock her off too.

By the way, Lost fans posting online have posited that Naomi Dorrit’s name is an anagram for two phrases that are descriptions of her as a person: “maid in rotor,” which perhaps refers to her introduction to the show as having leapt from a helicopter, and “raid monitor,” which could confirm that Charlie and Ben’s allegations that she has a far more sinister job than as Penelope’s scout wanting to help the whole cast home.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

It's a fantastic movie that Kill Bill owes more to than perhaps any other influence. Think of Kill Bill's plot set in 1700s Japan and with Lucy Liu's character, O-ren Ishii, as the heroine on the hunt for revenge. Considering that Lady Snowblood came out in 1973, the above image is in remarkable condition, so much so that it looks like it could actually be a still from a scene in the intentionally retro Kill Bill.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Two notes: (1) This has nothing to do with the M&Ms commercial. (2) The name of this band being "The The" and the name of the song being "This Is the Day," the above is a video that does not lend itself particularly well to Googling.

I have freed Russian Enlightenment personality Yekaterina Romanovna Vorontsova-Dashkova from high school world history text books and placed her on this blog solely to point out the unwieldiness of her name. "Yerovoda" for short, maybe?

Monday, May 21, 2007

So I have an affinity for various forgotten aspects of video games I played long ago. Included in this interests are minor female characters, who by virtue of being female are rarely a game's central character and by virtue of being minor tend to express personality traits not often associated with a central heroine, who usually must be beautiful and benevolent and rather sexless. Recently, I've been thinking about the damsel-in-distress that awaits players at the end of a more recent game, Wario Land Advance, the fourth in the a series that spun off of the Mario Land games, which marked the Nintendo mascot's entry into the world of handheld video game systems. Two titles in, however, Nintendo pitted Mario against his evil alterego, Wario, who proved immediately popular and starred as the antihero of the third game, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3. From then on, the games disregarded the Mario Land numbering and followed Wario Land as if it had been the first. Wario Land Advance is often called Wario Land 4.

Anyway, in this game, Wario is raiding the Golden Temple, whose former owner, the purportedly dead Princess Shokora, is the woman who awaits rescue at the end. What's especially interesting about Shokora — other than the fact that her being dead has apparently not freed her from the threat of kidnapping — is that she actually appears throughout the game — as the black cat who follows Wario throughout the Golden Pyramid and as the Mr. Game & Watch-looking fellow who peddles items for Wario to use in boss battles. The curse placed placed on her by the Golden Diva — the game's big bad— apparently lets Shokora exist in any shape other than her own.

So on top of appearing in multiple forms in the game — thus eliminating the possibility of finding a "true" Shokora — there's few images of her available online. Even a Google search won't turn up much.

Thus, I present the following.

your princess is an alley cat

game & princess

As for what Shokora actually looks like, I'm still not so sure. In the game's ending sequence, she appears to Wario in one of four form, depending on how much treasure Wario has collected over the course of the game.

clockwise from the top left: best, good, not so good, bottom of the barrel

If Wario collects all the available treasure, he gets a rather stern-looking Shokora with cropped hair and what would appear to be a prince's outfit. The runner-up form — the Princess Peach look-alike — is then not the "best" form Wario can meet, even though she certainly looks more like a typical end-of-the-game damsel than the ultimate prize. To complicate the matter somewhat, an image of a newspaper glimpsed during the game's intro shows a black-and-white photo of Shokora that would seem to be based off her "runner-up" form and not the somewhat masculinized version.

Could this be a joke on Wario? Like, he's such an anti-hero that his completion of the game to its fullest is rewarded with a sort of joke prize of a less feminine damsel. It reminds me of the ending of the first Wario Land game, in which Wario strives to obtain a large-scale statue of Princess Peach to give to her as a gift, only to have Mario sweep in and snatch it away at the last moment. Or could this be more of a commentary on video game damsels, with Shokora's appearance becoming increasingly appealing the richer Wario gets? Is the final, less cute version indicative of Shokora's financial interests? Odd stuff, to say the least. At least anybody else trying to find images of Princess Shokora's various forms will be able to.

And as for Baby Shokora and Wario-looking Shokora... Well, I wouldn't want to get a kiss from them either.

EDIT: I was twiddling about online today and ending up looking at a Japanese-to-English dictionary and found that Shokora's name is actually the Japanese approximation for the English word "chocolate," which would put her in league with most of the other women in the Mario and Wario game universe, who nearly always seem to be named after things that taste good, smell nice or are pretty to look at.

Sunday, May 20, 2007

So when did Mario get his start as an athlete? Mario Kart perhaps, since that game established the effectiveness of the Mario spin-offs? Or was it NES Open Tournament Golf, since that was Mario's first starring role in a sports title? Or could it even be plain ol' NES Golf, even though Mario looked more like some golf-playing uncle who just happened to be named "Mario" rather than the mustached wonder himself?

None of these is the true origin of Mario sports, actually.

In keeping up with my fascination with obscure bits of Mario trivia, I thought I'd mention this: the nearly forgotten Game & Watch title Donkey Kong Hockey. There's not much information available about this 1984 game online. Its Wikipedia entry is basically limited to stating it exists and noting that "Critics claim that if Nintendo put the same amount of work into the game as they did on the design, the game would have been better."

Donkey Kong Hockey had a wider screen that most Game & Watch releases. It also featured two control pads, so players could go head-to-head, with one playing as D.K. and the other playing as Mario.

What interests me especially about this title is that hockey is the one sport that Mario and crew have not yet returned to. With tennis, golf, baseball, basketball and soccer being done to death, could this be the next event Mario turns to? Perhaps not, if the game was as unpopular as some negative reviews imply. But of all sports to pick, why on earth did Nintendo pick hockey to be Mario's sports debut?

NeoGAF has posted an interesting graph that shows how various Mario games have sold in Japan. See that big Fiery Mario on the far right? That tells you that Japanese gamers have collectively purchased 6,810,000 copies of the original Super Mario Bros. That's probably not surprising, but the runner-up may be. The Japanese apparently love New Super Mario Bros. enough to sent 4,419,952 copies flying off shelves.

Interesting — and laid out in a graphically appealing format. Click the above image for a larger version.

Post-Coachella, Sarah put up an article up at Independent.com telling about her experiences as a first-timer. In it, she recalled that I ordered — and consumed — two snowcones, back-to-back. It's true. I did. And I did it with a big, stained grin on my face. (What the article didn't mention is that I asked for extra syrup on the second one, sugar-addled fifth grader-style.) The second of these two frosty treats — which in 100-degree Indio heat seriously rocked my world — was flavored with the delicious but mysterious flavor of blue raspberry.

I've often wondered exactly why this flavor exists, much less in the abundance it does today. Raspberries, after all, aren't blue. Yet virtually any candy offering a rainbow of flavor sensations picks blue to be raspberry. The rest (in order) generally go as follows: cherry or strawberry, orange, lemon (though banana flavor for sadistic candy companies), lime or green apple, and finally grape (blackcurrant in the U.K). On a good day, pink might be watermelon, which makes about as much sense as blue raspberry but that's a different blog post. And then, almost always, blue raspberry is stuck there, between lime and grape. Odd, no? I mean, we have tasty blue berries already. They're called "blueberries." Yet the flavor is generally what I imagine is a flavor that doesn't exist in nature matched with a color that doesn't generally appear on non-poisonous things.

Sadly, Google is not particularly helpful in solving this mystery, so I have to take what I can get. And that's Wikipedia. Take it with a grain of salt, but the Wikipedia entry for "blue raspberry" states that the flavor does not come from a real blue fruit, but was derived in the late '50s from the juice of whitebark raspberry fruit juice. Its pairing with electric blue food dye, Wikipedia explains, helps differentiate the flavor from strawberry. (And here I thought the color was just for the added benefit of turning one's mouth all Smurfy.) The entry concludes with a short list of various brands that have incorporated the flavor, including (in order) Go-Gurt, ICEE, Dum Dum Pops, Jolly Ranchers, Skittlers, and Hubba Bubba. (Read that list out loud as see if in doesn't put a smile on your face. Works best if screamed. At work.) In short, the concept of blue raspberry is a total fabrication that now sours in my stomach.

A small debate on the entry's talk page questions, however, if the flavor might have a real-life basis after all. Some allege that the fruit species Rubus leucodermis — which literally translates to "white-skinned bramble berry" but is more popularly called as the "whitebark raspberry" or, oddly, the "black raspberry" — is known to some Native Americans as the "blue raspberry," though often as the frambuesa azul. Could be, but one should note that a Google search for that turns up mostly Spanish-language sites hawking the same list of candy brands to Spanish-speakers.

And if we trust what Google tells us — and who doesn't? — then I think we have our answer.

Common in the Sea of Japan, the ayakashi is an enormous eel-like creature, not very big around but said to be several thousand meters in length. It sometimes will travel straight over a small boat in an arc, and it is so long that it takes two or three days to finish. In the meantime the men aboard the boat are thoroughly occupied, bailing out the abundant sheets of oil that spill from the ayakashi's body.

For whatever reason, I find the idea of a monster that long, constantly filling some poor guy's boat with water inherently hilarious.

Saturday, May 19, 2007

A quick one to brighten your dreary existence: In their original Belgian incarnation, the Smurfs were knows as "Les Schtroumpfs." Say it aloud. Shout it from your workplace cubicle or home computer den. Let the neighbors know.

i come home and find that all the windows have been broken. there's glass all over the stairs at the front door and in the hallway, too. i continue walking in, all the while hearing that icy crunch under my feet. in the kitchen, too, all the glass is broken, even all the cups. i look down and realize that a pair of bloody footprints lead into where i'm standing. clearly, someone has cut their feet on the broken glass. i trace the steps back to the front door. about at the moment i realize the bloody footprints have walked everywhere i have, i realize that i'm not wearing shoes and that the footprints are mine.

And that, folks, was the kind of dream that makes me sit upright in bed.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

NOTE: If you subscribe to the "games only" feed of this blog, you maybe be confused as to why this is showing up. In truth, this is a re-post of an entry I put up on another blog quite a while ago. However, given that Back of the Cereal Box has focused more and more on gaming, I feel like it belongs here. Consider this posted for posterity's sake.

Yeah, I'm picking on Peach today. If she's the most visible female character in the most popular video game franchises ever, I feel comfortable examining whether how well she represents gender in the Marioverse.

Had I asked the question posed in this post's title ten years ago, the answer to the above question would be a resounding "no." To be blunt, Peach — who only had then only recently shed the first name "Toadstool" in the States — was a big pink sissy whose primary function in life was to get kidnapped and scream for help. Peach didn't even have the honor of being the first leading lady in Mario's life. That character, of course, was Pauline, who did about as much and at least got to wear a more modern-looking outfit. With her floor-length royal gown and odd, flipped-out Farah Fawcett hair, Peach was a deadweight character — a reminder of what a woman's place was 50 years ago. She was an uber-stereotype of what women should be, injected into the Mario series to balance out the overwhelmingly male cast with a double dose of sugar-coated girliness.

It's a Man's World… on the NES

I suppose it's interesting that Peach is the apparent ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom. But does it make sense that she's the head honcho and still saddled with the title "princess" instead of "queen" or "prime minister" or — I don't know — "admiral"? The American version of the instruction manual for Super Mario Bros. makes sure to explain away the confusion with the alleged existence of the Mushroom King. Presumably Peach's father, the guy never appears in the series. On top of that, I have to question whether Nintendo's placement of a female character at the helm of a fantasy nation like the Mushroom Kingdom is really such a noble move, considering that Bowser promptly toppled her reign and enslaved her people. It's a good lesson: Girls can't be in charge.

Sure, Nintendo made an initial effort to give Peach something to do besides get carried away. They gave her a fully playable role in the American Super Mario Bros. 2. She could jump, pluck and run with the rest of the cast. And if anybody wanted to, they could easily play through the game's twenty stages solely as the princess. I know I always picked her — perhaps because choosing a female character was novel for a platformer junkie like myself. However, if you really think about it, Peach is a beginner's character. Unlike Luigi — who can reach such great heights with his bicycle-kicking legs — Peach's jumping ability's let her hovercraft over baddies, thus negating any direct interaction with them.

And while having one active female character may be notable for American releases of its day, keep in mind that the game Super Mario Bros. 2 was based on, Doki Doki Panic, featured two heroines alongside two heroes. The long-jumping Peach was initially the pink-veiled Lina, while the high-jumping Luigi was initially the blue-veiled Mama. That's Even Steven, not the token girl role seen in the Super Mario Bros. 2 version. In my book, that a step backward.

See Peach Run… in the 16-bit Era

Heroics in Super Mario Bros. 2 aside, Nintendo didn't gave much of anything for Peach to do besides overcoming captivity until well after Super Mario World. She finally got her second playable role in Super Mario Kart, in which she and Yoshi formed the quick-accelerating faction of the available characters. Out of the eight available racers, Peach was the only female. Nonetheless, it cemented her status as a playable character in future Mario spin-offs.

Given the relative unpopularity of the Virtual Boy, likely next-to-nobody played Mario's Tennis. The game did, however, mark the first Mario sports outing in which Peach was playable. (The immediately preceding sports title, NES Open Tournament Golf notably featured Peach and Daisy as non-functional caddies. Boo on that.) Even this game, however, makes Peach a notable minority. Recently, it surfaced that the planned line-up was to include Birdo as playable as well. However, before the final version hit shelves, Birdo was cut, rendering Peach a token once again.

Perhaps her first chance at doing anything respectable since Super Mario Bros. 2 was Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. Once again, Nintendo allowed Peach to tackle baddies alongside Mario. (It's possible that RPG giant Square, which co-developed the game designed it to be so. Generally, Square had a better track record with active female characters.) And Peach played her role with flair, too. Although the game could have relegated to the status of party healer — as her Group Hug ability was an ideal all-member HP-raiser — Peach was at least allotted a weapon that put her on par with heavy hitters like Bowser and Geno. Tragically, that weapon was the Frying Pan. The item alluded well to Peach's future as a capable cake-baker, it was yet another reminder that Peach is, in fact, a girl.

Out of the Kitchen and Into the Action

Only during the years of the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube did Peach finally come into her own. Nearly any Mario game now featured Peach in some kind of playable role, from Mario Kart 64 to the first Mario Party to sports titles, Peach is dependably playable. Not in Super Mario 64, of course — that's a "big" Mario game.

But she did in others — and that's a start.

For example, Peach appeared in the Nintendo 64 version of Mario Golf with Plum and Maple — two generic human characters who never appeared again. Granted, Plum and Maple may not have ended up mattering all that much in the grand scheme of the Marioverse, but it's important to note that Peach was finally the main female character and not the only female character. The trend was repeated with the Nintendo 64 Mario Tennis, when Peach was joined by Birdo and Daisy, both of whom were promptly admitted to the regular Mario spin-off cast.

Her biggest coup of this age would have to be Paper Mario, in which the game's interstitial segments featured the princess as playable and prowling around her castle, the whole of which had been abducted by Bowser. Peach did so with the aid of her own partner character, a counterpart of sorts to the little buddies that followed Mario throughout this game. Peach's little friend, Twink — a suggestively named but nonetheless helpful star-creature — even helped Peach in her one-and-only fight in the game: the penultimate against Bowser's second-in-command, Kammy Koopa. It's noteworthy, I guess, that the series pitted its number one female character against the the game's most prominent female villain.

It only makes sense, given that the Paper Mario games are the unofficial inheritor to the legacy of Square's Super Mario RPG, but Peach ended up being even more prominent in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Again, Peach starred in her own segments — many of which featured her creepily romancing a supercomputer — but the game also posed her as the second-to-last boss. The Shadow Queen — herself a powerful female character — possesses Peach at the game's end, forcing Mario to battle a demonic, black-clad Peach in order to save the world. For what it's worth, she puts up quite a fight. But Mario still knocks her on her ass.

Smash Bros. Melee — A Study Unto Itself

Leaps and bounds above typical Mario action though her RPG outings might allow, the biggest testament to Peach's place in video games as a whole, however, would have to be the Gamecube installment of Smash Bros.. Nintendo contrasts Peach and her super-femininity against a handful of other female characters, all of which are masculinized in some way. For example: Peach, Samus, and Zelda are all slender, blonde video game heroines. Samus, however, fights solely in her Chozo suit space armor. To the uninitiated gamer, Samus might as well be a dude. Zelda, much like Peach, appears in her default appearance as a princess in a pink dress. However, half of Zelda's powers stem from her transformation into her "male" alterego, Sheik. If a player wants, he or she could select the Ice Climbers with the female member, Nana, as the leader. That, however, is not the default arrangement, which instead doffers the male member — Popo, suited in masculine blue — as the leader and Nana — suited in feminine pink — as the follower. Even Jigglypuff, whose alternate costumes include bows and tiaras, is not clearly gendered.

Thus, it's Peach who, of the game's 25 available characters, is indubitably, irrefutably the most feminine. More so, she's quite the effective character. Even when her most powerful attack involves swinging that damned stereotypical frying pan, Peach manages to fend off her opponents with an interesting mix of aerial maneuvers — that is, retro Super Mario Bros. 2-style hovering — and close-quarters combat. She's the only female character whose arsenal of attacks doesn't require to deny her femininity in any way.

Superficially, Peach is just one of Melee's more effective fighters. Deep down, she's the sole combatant who is entirely feminine — and none the worse for it

Highs and Lows of Late

Easily, Peach's lowest point in recent days would be that one scene in Super Mario Sunshine in which Mario confronts Bowser Jr. and the tyke reveals the big plan for kidnapping Peach. Junior elaborates that Bowser told him to nab the princess because she's his mother. Stunned, Peach puts her hand to her mouth. "I'm your mommy?" she asks, with all the self-awareness of a refrigerator magnet. From the way the line is spoken, it hard to say whether Peach is just shocked at the revelation of the plan or if she honestly thinks she could be the mother of Bowser's son. Before anyone can ask a follow-up question, Bowser Jr. makes of with "mom" and she is not scene again until after Bowser — both senior and junior — are vanquished.

Given my affection for Peach during her playable appearance in Super Mario Bros. 2, I was perhaps more excited than anyone about her starring role in the Nintendo DS title Super Princess Peach. Perhaps because Melee set my expectations so high for an empowered princess, I was especially disappointed with Nintendo's decision to arm Peach with such a stereotypical set of weapons: her quickly-changing emotions. As was pointed out in the article "Trouble in Super Macho World," having a series's only female star be manipulated by her own emotions may not have been the most progressive notion for her first starring role. Furthermore, the game was insanely easy, as if the people who'd want to play as Peach wouldn't be good enough to tackle a "real" game. At the same time, however, the game did finally feature Peach stomping and bopping on her own — and on a quest to rescue Mario and Luigi, no less.

The only other social advance that can be credited to the days of the Gamecube would be fashion-related. For example, Peach's outfit in Super Mario Sunshine. She finally gets to shed her courtly clothes and dress like a normal person. As far as athletic competition goes, Peach got another first in the soccer title Super Mario Strikers: pants — or shorts, anyway. I seriously wonder if the game's developers had to ask special permission to put the princess in something besides a skirt.

Piich and the Wii

We'll have to wait and see how Peach fares on the Wii, as the vast majority of her appearances so far have been in Virtual Console titles. However, Peach received a sizable role in Super Paper Mario. It nearly makes up for her misogynistic portrayal in Super Princess Peach and her absence in Super Mario 64 DS. In short, Nintendo lets her do everything the boys can do. Though it's technically a platformer, Peach hops and bops with the best of them. She can fight bosses — causing the same amount of damage as Mario does — or she can flit around with her umbrella, which seems to have replaced her natural hovering ability seen in Super Mario Bros. 2. Even more to the point, Peach isn't a playable character that you unlock after defeating the game. She's there nearly from the get-go and she teams up with Mario even before Bowser does.

An especially interesting aspect of Peach's appearance in Super Paper Mario is the game's set-up: a forced wedding between her and Bowser. It's a little heartening to see her rebelling against that kind of bossiness. Sure, she's not rejecting marriage outright but just to the guy who kidnaps her on a regular basis. But it's still good to see her turn up her nose at the idea of becoming Mrs. Bowser. She has a spine after all.

The Answer?

Given her history, Peach has a lot to work against — more so than, say, Ms. Pac-Man, who by virtue of that title "Ms." became a feminist figure almost immediately. However, Nintendo is doing better. Peach is no longer the only playable female character in a given game. And as Nintendo adds more characters to the mix, I'd be shocked if they don't continue to even out the gender ratio. We may not see another Super Princess Peach in the near future, given lackluster sales figures and poor critical reception. But if Nintendo does decide to put the princess in the spotlight again, we can hope they'll know not to make her any more girly than she already is making her emotions fluctuate in the kind of violent manner that usually necessitates medication.

In the end, I have to give a tentative "no" to the question of whether Peach could be considered a feminist figure. That answer may not surprise too many people. Take one look at that dress and hear her cutesy giggles, and most would assume she's worse than a Disney princess on a high after her weekly prettiness injections. However, if you think about it, Nintendo's gotten better about treating her more like an actual character and not just a pretty pink thing waiting in Bowser's jail.

Smash Bros. Melee-level respectability aside, however, she's got a ways to go before Nintendo can stop dragging her into the depths of the sewer of stereotypes. Ask me again when we're awaiting the dawn of the next generation of video games, however, and I might well have a different answer.

Seriously, does the name of this Bigelow-brand tea make sense to anybody else?

I've seen it a hundred times before but only really noticed it for the first time yesterday. After initially reading it as "Constant Cement" I re-read it, only to be nonetheless baffled. And why is the name in quotes? Is that the comment? The hell?

Jerry Falwell has died. I will not revel in his death. Hearing that he keeled over after breakfast with a friend, I must ask whether he truly fell well. But that's just a bad pun. That's not reveling. It's nice, however, to have a well-known figure kick the bucket and not have to pretend I'm sad in any way. That being said, I will say that I sincerely, sincerely hope that some kind of heavenly clerical error sends Falwell to Gay Heaven. If such a place doesn't already exist outside of some bar in the Castro, I hope it now exists and Falwell is there, horrified and on the receiving end of cutting remark after cutting remark from the likes of Paul Lynde.

In closing, I would like to submit one image for your perusal.

It's been said before, I'm sure, but I'm not sure whether the bigger sin being depicted is Falwell's pride — at displaying a painting of himself — or gluttony — at having gained so much weight between the time the painting was made and this photo taken.

Last week, as I slowly work through my Netflix queue, I watched the 1973 film The Candy Snatchers. It's exploitation, for sure, but not as raunchy as the title might imply. (The film, does, however concern the kidnapping of a 17-year-old schoolgirl named Candy, if that gives you any indication of the plot.) Anyway, the DVD included interviews with the film's female castmembers, including Tiffany Bolling, who recalled how she became involved with the project and what she did with her life aside from Snatchers. Among Bolling's accomplishments was a role on a short-lived Aaron Spelling show that the actress refers to as being "lost" now. I wasn't clear exactly how she meant that, so I looked online.

Turns out Bolling meant "lost" with a capital "L," as she was a regular on a 1969 series called The New People. It lasted for a season, during which viewers could enjoy the exploits of 40-some college students who crashed on a deserted island en route home from a semester abroad in southeast Asia. All the adults died, leaving the students a chance to re-invent society, much in the manner a lot of 60s radicals wanted to: free of the prejudices that marred life before the island. However, such a utopia was elusive, and the show dealt with problems faced by the marooned. Racism reared it head. Someone alleged to have been raped. Somebody brought a gun or something.

the leads, who apparently escaped their wrecked ship with luggage in hand

At its most bare bones levels, the plot resembles Lost's, though clearly Lost has done a better job hooking viewers. The New People is also remarkable in that it was one of the few 45-minute TV shows ever broadcast. (It shared a 90-minute slot with another series, The Music Scene.) For more, check out the page on the Television Obscurities, which includes video clips of the show. The site notes that info on the show is hard to come by, as its been nearly forgotten.

Thankfully, all seventeen episodes of The New People are held at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. A 16mm transfer of the pilot episode is also in the hands of private collectors. A novel and two comic books were published during the show's run back in 1969. A handful of promotional images also survive as well as some promotional records with original music from the series. Additionally, Television Obscurities holds in its archives several reel-to-reel tapes used in the production of the series as well as an original script from September 1969.

One of the few bits of evidence I could find online was a page scanned from an old 16 magazine in what essentially amounts to beefcake photos.

Another good trivia note: When asked by Entertainment Weekly if the Lost creators knew about The New People, executive producer Damon Lindelof said that they didn't.

"I wish we had known about it before,'' says Damon Lindelof, exec producer of Lost, ''so we could've changed Charlie's [Dominic Monaghan] band name to The New People instead of Driveshaft.''

My souvenir from this year's Coachella — aside from photos and the unavoidable, permanent hearing loss I think I've suffered — is the music I now have that I wouldn't have otherwise. Though I could have used the event to check out new bands that, given their appearance on the line-up, I would probably dig. But more often, I end up seeing the acts I already know and like, who also tend to populate the Coachella stages.

The clear winner for this year's batch, at least as far as my iTunes play count is concerned, is CSS, a São Paulo indie band whose three-letter name stands for "Cansei de Ser Sexy," a Portuguese translation of a quote by Beyoncé Knowles about how she is "tired of being sexy." Mike and Kristen touted the band's rockitude in the hotel room the night before their set, but I brushed the recommendation off. After all, I had pictures to take. In retrospect, I should have caught CSS. Though they might look like an American Apparel photo shoot set to music, CSS makes the kind of dance rock that my inner hipster craves. Their big hit, "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above," was apparently used in some promos for Ugly Bety earlier this year, but it somehow escaped my notice.

This is the video. It tickles me inside, in the appropriate way.

The top of my personal charts, however, belongs to "Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex." I doubt this — what I'm guessing is a parody of R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet" video starring who I think is the midget from Gummo — is the track's official video. I have to like a song that includes lines like these.

Music is my beach houseMusic is my hometownMusic is my king-size bedMusic is my hot, hot bathMusic is my hot, hot sexMusic is my back rubMusic is where I'd like you to touch

Monday, May 14, 2007

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that a woman kidnapped and brainwashed by the Symbionese Liberation Army would have developed a sense of humor. Nonetheless, I was thoroughly impressed by Patty Hearst's quote in which she pooh-poohed the notion that she gave Paris Hilton advice about how to survive jail.

I must say that my heart goes out to the inmates of the Century Regional Detention Center. Forty-five days with Paris Hilton and the attendant publicity seems like cruel and unusual punishment to me. Perhaps THEY should be petitioning the Governor for relief?

Ka-BLAM! You hear that, Paris Hilton? You just got publicly dissed by a woman ten times the heiress you are. You watch out when you get out of jail, Paris Hilton. Tania's gonna gun you down.

As George points out, the Vertigo character played by Kim Novak is Madeleine Elster, not Madeleine Astor. The latter is apparently a real-life personage who survived the Titanic. And don’t confuse either Madeleine with my beloved writing professor Madeleine, who is cool and is responsible for this. A madeleine can also be a delicious French pastries that looks like this.

And, oddly, Webster says a madeleine can also be "one that evokes a memory," which has interesting implications for Vertigo.

What appears below is part of an old brochure for Mystery Park, an "amusement park" in Interlaken, Switzerland that is dedicated to crackpot theories. Kristen and I passed through a few years back, took one look at the brochure and quickly decided not to go but to instead laugh at Mystery Park and its adherents. I kept the brochure because the address of the founder — a cardio emergency of a man named Erich von Däniken — was especially hilarious.

Seriously, this was apparently the best photo they could find, even with the bolo tie askew.

It's not exactly a face that elicits my trust. Here is the letter to potential visitors that so tickled me. My favorite phrase — which I would guess arose from a rough translation — became the title of this post.

And then there's an image of what I assume is people building the pyramids, only it looks like it was created on a Nintendo 64.

Finally, a quick Wikipedia check on the park indicates that it is the subject of some controversy. Dubbed "a cultural Chernobyl" by a member of the Swiss Academy of Sciences, the park drew ire from science-types for von Däniken's allegations that aliens are responsible for various human triumphs, like the Nazca Lines. Also, it's currently closed, due to financial problems. I'd guess too many people saw the brochure.

Not long ago, I posted a little ditty here about the SNL "Dear Sister" clip, which made fun of something I hadn't seen in a way I didn't understand and using a song I hadn't heard before. A few days back, the AIM sign-in page — which almost always posts a lot of garbage I have no interest in reading — had an article up about the very spoof.

It answered some questions.

What, exactly, was the bit spoofing? The target was the season two finale from The OC, after all. The article notes the oddness of making fun of something that old.

That episode of “The O.C.,” a series that has been canceled, was broadcast two years ago, but does that really matter? The formula is instantly accessible — over-the-top violence plus slow-motion reaction shots plus cheesy music — and the parody seemed to some like a comment on the tricks of editing.

Why wasn't it officially posted by NBC, as most SNL digital shorts are? Officially, the the music rights to the Imogen Heap song used in the clip were never cleared for online re-broadcasts. The fact that the Virginia Tech massacre happened shortly thereafter had little to do with the clip not being put online, though I'd imagine it didn't help the case.

So then what? Some posters have been putting the clip online illegally, only to have YouTube yank it. Other YouTubers have been uploading their own takes on it — some editing violent movies like The Departed and The Matrix to reference the clip. It's even been awarded it's own tag: SNLOCmeme.

Here's the original again. I don't care what anybody says about it being inappropriate to watch. It's still funny.

Here's a direct response video blog.

Here's a less reverent response.

And here's one employing the cast of bygone TGIF sitcom Step by Step.

And here's one using NES classic Duck Hunt.

And here's another that employs my grief of griefs last year, Libby's murder at the hands of Michael "They Took My Boy" Dawson from Lost.

One last question:

So that Imogen Heap song must be getting a lot of attention. Is it any good? No, actually. It kind of blows. Perhaps because these memes have popularized one ten-second snippet from it, listening to it ended up with me waiting for that one part to play. And when it did, I was tired of it. Lost of warbling and looking at the weird facial expressions. Bleh.

The one benefit I can see to all this is that the mimicry has drained the life from the song. Now nobody will everybody will ever be able to use it again seriously.